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This is the story of a young boy from India who is moving with his family to Canada. In Indai, his father owned a zoo, and they are transporting many of the animals that have been sold to Canada. They are on a large ship sailing across the pacific when tragedy strikes and the ship sinks. The lone survivor - Pi - is telling the story to an author who wants to write his story. Pi tells the story of how he spent 277 days on the ocean with a 450 pound Bengal tiger before they hit land in Mexico and were saved. He loses his whole family when that ship sinks, and now as an adult, he recollects his experience with a fantastic story of survival.

This is a great book. I have seen the movie, but have never read it. My eldest daughter - who is 14 - had to read this book for school, so we decided to do it together. I enjoyed that as much as I did the book.

This book is well written. It has funny parts, and the story is truly griping. My daughter was sad when the story ended because it really is a fantastic tale. A must read.

My impression of this book suffers for the circumstances under which I read it. I was ill in hospital and near bed-ridden, so the parallel of a boat drifting on the Pacific ocean and the monotony of my days in a closed room felt very much overlapped.

I feel that the base story of this book is well known, or at least what makes up the bulk of the setting, and I'm not sure one can say much more without getting into a lengthy conversation about "why?" It is ponderous outside of Pi's daily survival activities, and few books have made both inclined to think and inclined to accept the face value at the same time.

Perhaps I will read it again, to see just how much my state of mind was colouring my view at the time. ( )

The story is engaging and the characters attractively zany. Piscine Molitor Patel (named after a family friend's favourite French swimming pool) grows up in Pondicherry, a French-speaking part of India, where his father runs the local zoo. Pi, Hindu-born, has a talent for faith and sees nothing wrong with being converted both to Islam and to Christianity. Pi and his brother understand animals intimately, but their father impresses on them the dangers of anthropomorphism: invade an animal's territory, and you will quickly find that nearly every creature is dangerous

Granted, it may not qualify as ''a story that will make you believe in God,'' as one character describes it. But it could renew your faith in the ability of novelists to invest even the most outrageous scenario with plausible life -- although sticklers for literal realism, poor souls, will find much to carp at.

The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity — it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.

Evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.

I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.

Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food is low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured.

Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether contemplating it when life is safe and stale, or fleeing it when life is threatened and precious.

It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while… [S]urely we are … permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation

We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man. In a general way we mean how our species' excessive predatoriness has made the entire planet our prey. More specifically, we have in mind the people who feed fishhooks to the otters, razors to the bears, apples with small nails in them to the elephants and hardware variations on the theme: ballpoint pens, paper clips, safety pins, rubber bands, combs, coffee spoons, horseshoes, pieces of broken glass, rings, brooches and other jewellery (and not just cheap plastic bangles: gold wedding bands, too), drinking straws, plastic cutlery, ping-pong balls, tennis balls and so on. The obituary of zoo animals that have died from being fed foreign bodies would include gorillas, bison, storks, rheas, ostriches, seals, sea lions, big cats, bears, camels, elephants, monkeys, and most every variety of deer, ruminant and songbird. Among zookeepers, Goliath's death is famous; he was a bull elephant seal, great big venerable beast to two tons, star of his European zoo, loved by all visitors. he died of internal bleeding after someone fed him a broken beer bottle.

My story started on a calendar day--July 2nd, 1977--and ended on a calendar day--February 14th, 1978--but in between there was no calendar. I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.

What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell.

Last words

Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.

Wikipedia in English (2)

After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan—and a 450-pound royal bengal tiger. -Amazon

Haiku summary

Boat on the oceanWas there really a tiger?We will never know.(mamajoan)

Winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction Pi Patel is an unusual boy. The son of a zookeeper, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior, a fervent love of stories, and practices not only his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them "the truth." After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional-but is it more true? Life of Pi is at once a realistic, rousing adventure and a meta-tale of survival that explores the redemptive power of storytelling and the transformative nature of fiction. It's a story, as one character puts it, to make you believe in God. Publisher Fact Sheet. A fabulist novel that combines the delight of Kipling's Just So Stories with the metaphysical adventure of Jonah and the Whale.… (more)